Introduction

This article provides guidance on how to properly store passwords for user authentication in order to help prevent password theft.

Passwords are frequently stored encrypted or as clear text. Clear text passwords can be read directly by the database's administrator, super users or via data theft by SQL Injection. If encrypted, these same techniques may also allow the attacker to gain access to the decryption key as well. Database backup media is also vulnerable to password theft if these passwords are included on the backup. It is recommended that you avoid storing the clear text password or an encrypted version of the password. Passwords should be strongly hashed as described below.

Password Storage Rules

Passwords are secrets that only the account owner should know. For the system that uses these passwords to authenticate its users, there is no reason to decrypt them under any circumstances. It is crucial that passwords are stored in a way that allows them to be verified but not reversed in any way, even by insiders.

Rule 1: Use a Modern Hash Algorithm

Hash algorithms have the ability to transform data from one format (plaintext) to another (hash value) in a manner such that this process is not algorithmically reversible. This means that you can hash something, but there is no unhash. This is perfect for password storage since we wish to verify but not uncover the original value of the password. In addition an ideal password hashing algorithm will be deliberately "slow" in order to help mitigate brute-force password guessing attacks.

As such general hashing algorithms (eg, MD5, SHA-1/256/512) are not recommended for password storage. Instead an algorithm specifically designed for the purpose should be used such as bcrypt, PBKDF2 or scrypt.

Rule 2: Use a Long Cryptographically Random Per-User Salt

If each password is simply hashed, identical passwords will have the same hash. There are two drawbacks to hashing only the password:

In order to avoid this weakness, a per user account salt must be introduced into the hashing process. Such a salt should be appended to the beginning of the user supplied password before the combined value is hashed. The salt needs to be unique per user account. As long as you make use of one of the algorithms specifically designed for password storage (see list above) salting is managed internally and it shouldn't be necessary to manually add additional salt values

Recommendation: Make it hard to steal the salt

There are a number of additional recommended enhancements to the basic salting mechanism for consideration:

Have an additional 'system' salt that is a fixed value for the entire system. This should be stored in a configuration file somewhere. This fixed value would not have to be included every backup, making it even harder for an attacker to compromise all elements required to calculate the hash value properly.

Embedding a portion of the system salt in the source code. This wouldn't be that helpful for open source code, but for custom applications, having part of your system salt in the code would be yet one more item required by an attacker to calculate the hash value properly.

Generating a new salt for an account each time that user's password is changed.

An additional password storage defense mechanism involves storing the salt in a different location than the password hash. Use of the server's filesystem is one commonly used mechanism for salt isolation, assuming the password hashes are stored in different location such as a database or LDAP server. This defense mechanism reduces the risk of password theft when the database file is stolen, since the salts will not be included with the database data. Be careful to ensure that both the password hashes and the salts are not backed up together, they should also be backed up in isolation.

Rule 3: Iterate the hash

If a password database is ever compromised, one of the primary things defending the hashed passwords from being broken is the computational time required to guess password values. As such, we recommend slowing down the hash computation by iterating the hash operation many times. While hashing the password many times does slow down hashing for both attackers and typical users, typical users don't really notice it being that hashing is such a small percentage of their total time interacting with the system. On the other hand, an attacker trying to crack passwords spends nearly 100% of their time hashing, so hashing many times can slow down an attacker by a factor of N (# of iterations) while not noticeably affecting the typical user. A minimum of 1000 operations was recommended in the RSA PKCS5 standard in 2000, a value that should be doubled every 2 years. Therefore, in 2012, it is recommended that 64,000 iterations be considered. You should measure the time required and make sure that its as large as possible without providing a significantly noticeable delay when your users authenticate.